So I'm sitting in my hotel room on my last night in New Orleans, feeling a little like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas for some reason, except without all the booze, the cigarettes, or the hooker.

It was 3:00 am. I hadn't had a good night's sleep since I got into the city, and it's not for lack of trying. Evidently, someone else is also awake, because I can hear him wailing and crying from across the hall.

Frustrated, I walk down to the lobby to get a candy bar, and I ask the hotel clerk what the commotion was all about.

He tells me that this man, an alcoholic, has every booze-related disease in the book, and is just drinking himself to death. It'll take about three months. To top it off, he brought his family to watch him disintegrate from within.

That killed my desire to drink.